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BitKeeper guy here (predecessor to Git and Hg). If you think about the capabilities of a distributed source management system you can quickly see it's an enabl

BitKeeper guy here (predecessor to Git and Hg). If you think about the capabilities of a distributed source management system you can quickly see it's an enabler for out-sourcing. As a commercial DSCM provider, we got to watch a lot of out-sourcing attempts. In 18 years of doing that, I've only seen one really successful one. Which was a Portland based dev team and a Singapore based test team. Every day, the dev team would check in their stuff (or make it available in a test tree) and the Singapore team would wake up, pull it, test it, document the failures, the Portland team would wake up fix and dev some more, lather, rinse, repeat. As I recall, the Singapore team was out-sourced, different company, but they had a stable group of people dedicated to working with the Portland guys. It was more like two teams working on the same project. I've seen countless efforts based on "I can get 3 guys in India for what I have to pay one junior guy here" fail. The time difference makes communication hard, you have to send someone to manage the India guys and communicate what you want, there is zero loyalty, if a better gig comes along all the time you put into onboarding those guys is lost, the quality of the code is pretty crappy, etc. Pretty quickly it becomes not worth it.

le-mark 9y ago
This jives with what I've seen. One company I was at created a subsidiary company offshore and made the effort to hire FTEs. The offshore teams at that location were pretty damn good actually.
otakucode 9y ago
Yeah, the drawbacks of it being absurdly easy to get a "computer science degree" in India are real. And something I've also seen other major companies encounter is the total lack of any respect for IP law. If you want to get your app built cheap.... and then find your competitor running a reskinned identical version a month later... sure, outsource it.
- devnetfx 9y ago
  Absurdly easy to get a "computer science degree" in India It wasn't easy at all for me. I spend three years doing graduation in Bachelor of Computer Applications in India (early 2000). The coursework alone was so much that you would have "learn" something. On top of that, I did private diploma from NIIT for "practical" exercises (at that time NIIT and Aptech were quite popular among students) While I came to Australia for Masters, most of my friends did Master of Computer Applications (three years) in India. Six years of computer studies are bound to give you some knowledge!
  - xapata 9y ago
    > Six years of computer studies are bound to give you some knowledge! Why? There are plenty of classes that teach nothing, perhaps even teach bad habits.
  - otakucode 9y ago
    I shouldn't have spoken so generally, and I apologize. My knowledge of the situation is derived from researching the coursework involved in receiving a PhD in Computer Science from Bangalore University. At the time I researched it, it required (American) high school level math and then 6 months of additional courses. I had a professor who had 2 PhDs from this 'school'. In an 'Intro to Object Oriented Programming with C++' course, he taught us the wrong way to use cin to get a number from the user then assigned homework writing a program that accepted two integers and printed out their sum. At the next class, he announced that anyone who wrote the code as he instructed would receive an A despite it not working... and anyone who looked up how to make it actually work would get an F for not listening to him. A group of fellow students and I went straight to the department chair and he was shortly fired. That inspired me to research where he got his 'degrees' from.
- screye 9y ago
  I would like to qualify this statement. Getting a sub-par CS degree in India is extremely easy. There are a good number of bogus universities in the countries. Getting into a well reputed (top 50?) Indian CS program is multiple orders of magnitude harder than it is in the west. Most students qualifying for any of these programs would be capable of aceing the SATs. To give you an idea, the Indian equivalent of the engineering/CS SATs are taken by 1-1.5 million student annually. The top 50 programs have less than 20,000 combined positions. You need to be in the 98th percentile and above to get in. It is common for students to study 10+ hours a day for 2-4 years straight, to meet the above requirements. Whole childhoods get sacrificed for the rat race. Opportunity in India does not come easy.
compiler-guy 9y ago
“There is zero loyalty.” In business, even in the US, there is almost never loyalty. Or, perhaps more precisely: In business, you have to buy loyalty. I guarantee that there is a price at which you could buy a very stable, very competent team in India. But then it wouldn’t be super cheap outsourcing any more, and the benefits aren’t so great. If you want stability in your workforce, you gotta pay for it. Whether in cash, working conditions, or some other way. Pay for cheap labor, get cheap labor. And don’t be surprised or disappointed that you got it.
- andrei_says_ 9y ago
  Unfortunately the people counting the theoretical profit are different from the people paying the hidden costs. I’ve seen awesome devs leave after being assigned to check and ensure the quality of an offshore team. It’s more often than not a torturous and demoralizing task.
- megy 9y ago
  > In business, even in the US, there is almost never loyalty. There is loyalty here. You don't hire someone and they come in to work and work on OTHER PEOPLE'S PROJECTS. You don't get people lying to your face daily about their skills, it comes up pretty quickly that they can or can't do the work. Loyalty isn't just leaving because you have got a better offer.
  - praneshp 9y ago
    > There is loyalty here Correct, but your OP is saying you need to buy that loyalty.
- luckydude 9y ago
  I think there is some loyalty. As an example, my younger son is looking for his first job, I'm gonna see if the local grocery store will hire him, but I talked to him and said "Look Dylan, if you get a job there then you have to stick with it. They are going to spend time to train you, that's an investment, you need to stick with it even if you get bored." If US engineers bounced from job to job as much as the out-sourcing guys seem to it would be a red flag. I don't know what the norm is today, but back when I was hiring, people that didn't stick it out for at least a year at each company (and had no explanation, things happen, I'd allow for that), were considered less desirable than someone who stuck it out for longer. But in general, I agree with your point that you gotta pay if you want quality people. Good people are expensive. The lure of out-sourcing is a pipedream so far as I can tell.
JoeAltmaier 9y ago
That process worked for us too. We developed all day; the Indian team did full test sweeps their day and debugged issues; rinse and repeat. Trying to replace local devs with equal remote devs not so much.

le-mark 9y ago

This jives with what I've seen. One company I was at created a subsidiary company offshore and made the effort to hire FTEs. The offshore teams at that location were pretty damn good actually.

otakucode 9y ago

Yeah, the drawbacks of it being absurdly easy to get a "computer science degree" in India are real. And something I've also seen other major companies encounter is the total lack of any respect for IP law. If you want to get your app built cheap.... and then find your competitor running a reskinned identical version a month later... sure, outsource it.

devnetfx 9y ago
Absurdly easy to get a "computer science degree" in India It wasn't easy at all for me. I spend three years doing graduation in Bachelor of Computer Applications in India (early 2000). The coursework alone was so much that you would have "learn" something. On top of that, I did private diploma from NIIT for "practical" exercises (at that time NIIT and Aptech were quite popular among students) While I came to Australia for Masters, most of my friends did Master of Computer Applications (three years) in India. Six years of computer studies are bound to give you some knowledge!
- xapata 9y ago
  > Six years of computer studies are bound to give you some knowledge! Why? There are plenty of classes that teach nothing, perhaps even teach bad habits.
- otakucode 9y ago
  I shouldn't have spoken so generally, and I apologize. My knowledge of the situation is derived from researching the coursework involved in receiving a PhD in Computer Science from Bangalore University. At the time I researched it, it required (American) high school level math and then 6 months of additional courses. I had a professor who had 2 PhDs from this 'school'. In an 'Intro to Object Oriented Programming with C++' course, he taught us the wrong way to use cin to get a number from the user then assigned homework writing a program that accepted two integers and printed out their sum. At the next class, he announced that anyone who wrote the code as he instructed would receive an A despite it not working... and anyone who looked up how to make it actually work would get an F for not listening to him. A group of fellow students and I went straight to the department chair and he was shortly fired. That inspired me to research where he got his 'degrees' from.
screye 9y ago
I would like to qualify this statement. Getting a sub-par CS degree in India is extremely easy. There are a good number of bogus universities in the countries. Getting into a well reputed (top 50?) Indian CS program is multiple orders of magnitude harder than it is in the west. Most students qualifying for any of these programs would be capable of aceing the SATs. To give you an idea, the Indian equivalent of the engineering/CS SATs are taken by 1-1.5 million student annually. The top 50 programs have less than 20,000 combined positions. You need to be in the 98th percentile and above to get in. It is common for students to study 10+ hours a day for 2-4 years straight, to meet the above requirements. Whole childhoods get sacrificed for the rat race. Opportunity in India does not come easy.

compiler-guy 9y ago

“There is zero loyalty.” In business, even in the US, there is almost never loyalty. Or, perhaps more precisely: In business, you have to buy loyalty. I guarantee that there is a price at which you could buy a very stable, very competent team in India. But then it wouldn’t be super cheap outsourcing any more, and the benefits aren’t so great. If you want stability in your workforce, you gotta pay for it. Whether in cash, working conditions, or some other way. Pay for cheap labor, get cheap labor. And don’t be surprised or disappointed that you got it.

andrei_says_ 9y ago
Unfortunately the people counting the theoretical profit are different from the people paying the hidden costs. I’ve seen awesome devs leave after being assigned to check and ensure the quality of an offshore team. It’s more often than not a torturous and demoralizing task.
megy 9y ago
> In business, even in the US, there is almost never loyalty. There is loyalty here. You don't hire someone and they come in to work and work on OTHER PEOPLE'S PROJECTS. You don't get people lying to your face daily about their skills, it comes up pretty quickly that they can or can't do the work. Loyalty isn't just leaving because you have got a better offer.
- praneshp 9y ago
  > There is loyalty here Correct, but your OP is saying you need to buy that loyalty.
luckydude 9y ago
I think there is some loyalty. As an example, my younger son is looking for his first job, I'm gonna see if the local grocery store will hire him, but I talked to him and said "Look Dylan, if you get a job there then you have to stick with it. They are going to spend time to train you, that's an investment, you need to stick with it even if you get bored." If US engineers bounced from job to job as much as the out-sourcing guys seem to it would be a red flag. I don't know what the norm is today, but back when I was hiring, people that didn't stick it out for at least a year at each company (and had no explanation, things happen, I'd allow for that), were considered less desirable than someone who stuck it out for longer. But in general, I agree with your point that you gotta pay if you want quality people. Good people are expensive. The lure of out-sourcing is a pipedream so far as I can tell.

JoeAltmaier 9y ago

That process worked for us too. We developed all day; the Indian team did full test sweeps their day and debugged issues; rinse and repeat. Trying to replace local devs with equal remote devs not so much.